Category: Business

Knowing Your Procure To Pay Risks Makes Good Financial Sense

How much oversight do you really have over your accounts? You might have a fair idea of what is coming in and going out every month, but what do you know of the detail and your procure to pay risks? The fact is that it would be unfeasibly time-consuming to have every payment you make or receive checked against invoices, statements and other paperwork. That’s why duplicate payments, fraud and other glitches can cost businesses so much. The more transactions you make, the more money you are likely to be losing due to payments that are unnecessary. An accounts payable audit helps you to find where the leaks are in your system, throwing up warning signals when it seems like you have paid clients or suppliers when you shouldn’t have done. Recovery audit software allows you to gain back what you have lost over time.

Often the problem will be innocent enough. The average invoice might have something like twelve fields of data in it. Fill out or copy one of these wrong and the result could be an inaccurate payment – perhaps too much, perhaps too little, perhaps something that has been paid already. The mistake could have happened at your end or when the invoice was raised. However, in some cases it’s more dishonest than this. Unscrupulous suppliers might double-send an invoice, knowing that you don’t have the systems in place to catch such tricks. The amount might be familiar, and so it goes through the accounts without a second thought.

Duplicate payments and other types of overpayment can add up to a significant fraction of a firm’s turnover. If you engage in high volumes of low-value transactions, then even a small proportion of these will start to make a dent in your profit margin – and could mean the difference between sinking and staying afloat. Carrying out an accounts payable audit will often pay for itself the first time you do it. However, you should learn about procure to pay risks as soon as possible, because the longer you leave it the lower the chances of getting back your money. Companies go out of business, and individuals die or move away. If this has happened then realistically there is not a good chance of being compensated. Perhaps more importantly, you need to know what is going wrong now – it won’t just be past mistakes. There may be instances of ongoing fraud you need to protect yourself against, or cases where repeated problems occur month after month, and cost you more and more as you go on.

Please visit https://www.fiscaltec.com/ for further information…

Shops For Sale North London – Prices Favourable

Shops for sale in North London have, like all commercial property in North London, suffered in recent times. The credit crunch and resulting recession hit properties hard in capitals across the world. In many of these, prices have still not risen much. In London, however, the picture is unexpectedly different. Commercial property took a real hammering as the economy nosedived, and grade A office space in particular was badly hit. That meant a couple of things. Firstly, yields rose quite strongly as sale prices fell but rental prices dropped less sharply. Secondly, there were significant opportunities for external investors who recognised a bargain when they saw one – which is what happened not long afterwards. The relative strength of the Euro against the pound meant that investors on the continent (as well as further afield) made the most of the low prices. Whether it was a high-rise development in the Square Mile or shops for sale in North London, it could be seem as a potentially lucrative asset.

This dynamic led to a sharp bounce back in property prices in the capital. This was supported by a relative dearth of additional development. As the long-awaited recovery appears on the horizon – subject to further problems from the Eurozone – the bottleneck this will cause is expected to nudge prices even higher once again. Things in London aren’t exactly ‘business as usual’ but the picture there is much better than in other areas of the country, which helps as well. The GDP figures that the country awaits from quarter to quarter are not a reliable local indication, since they are not uniform; London and the southeast, in particular, are in a much stronger position economically than elsewhere.

Shops for sale in North London can thus be seen as an investment opportunity. Property has fallen from grace as an investment in recent times, being blamed as a major strand of the global economic traumas that are still working themselves out. Commercial property London doesn’t play by quite the same rules as property elsewhere – office space, industrial, retail or otherwise. This means that, assuming you’re able to stay in it for the medium-term, you can expect to make a profit on your purchase. A shop for sale in North London might not have the prestige of a skyscraper on Canary Wharf, but with a little work you could find it yielding the same kind of return on investment.

Please visit https://www.claridges-commercial.co.uk

Presentation Creation … That Does What It’s Created To Do

Powerpoint presentations are here to stay. Whatever the context of the business event, you’ll find they are almost always accompanied by a slideshow. It’s particularly true of sales presentations, where winning over the audience is absolutely crucial. However, Powerpoint is now treated as a standard fixture, which means that it’s used whether or not it’s worthwhile – a case of the tail wagging the dog. The problem is that Powerpoint design is frequently fairly unprofessional, and serves only to put off your listeners, not win them over to your way of thinking. Thus something that can be a remarkable asset can all too often become a liability. How do you avoid this happening?

People communicate in three main ways. There are those who want to give and receive large reams of information; they are noticeable by their habit of going into great detail and giving you more data than you generally need. There are those who tend to communicate on a more emotional platform, interpreting a situation by the way they feel about it. They tend to be more emotive in their own communication, too, using means that resonate on that level – colourful language, illustrations and intense descriptions of their feelings. And there are those who are far more instinctive and straightforward. They tend to want to get to the nub of a matter and make a decision quickly, and are interested in only the most fundamental details. Bear in mind that when you are communicating with a group of people, it will likely contain one or more of all of these types. Therefore you need to cater for their needs. Otherwise, you will find that you miss two-thirds of your audience, simply because you’re not communicating in a way that they find easy to engage with.

In terms of Powerpoint presentations, that means you need to craft your slides as well as your talk. You should make sure you cover all three means in your Powerpoint design. For your talk, give the content you need, of course. But you should combine it with illustrations and personal stories. You should also provide a summary for those who want hardly anything more. For your slides, you can do the same. Charts and graphs convey large amounts of information. Photographs and pictures appeal to a different aspect of the audience and will register emotionally, giving them something to remember. For the third group, a simple list of bullet points will give them what they need. Make sure you cater to everyone’s preferences and you’ll find your sales presentations have a higher degree of success.

Visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/

Invoice processing makes for more effective payments systems

Efficiency is the watchword in business now. With times tough and cuts starting to hurt, there is no reason for wasting time and money doing things in a slower or more torturous way than they need to be. The catch with this, however, is in moving from one familiar way of working to a more effective set of procedures. Although these will result in improved productivity – and therefore a healthier bottom line – there will always be some resistance out of a desire to keep the status quo. Document management is one way in which efficiency can be improved. Its aim is to turn paper documents of all kinds into electronic form (via document processing) and then arrange and employ them in the best way. This is particularly helpful in certain areas of business, such as invoice processing and your accounts department.

Invoice processing is vital because the stakes here can be higher than elsewhere. For starters, you may have a significant volume of payments and transactions occurring. That means a large number of invoices. The average invoice might have a dozen fields of data on it. You could be copying these manually a number of times – into your accounting systems, payment systems, and other records. Every time it is copied there is room for error to find its way in. And there is lots of evidence that this frequently occurs, resulting in unnecessary outgoings. Properly managed, your electronic invoices can be integrated with other accounting systems, significantly reducing the time required to deal with payments and also decreasing the scope for error.

In other instances, the efficiencies of time can be just as helpful. A single paper note or document can end up on someone’s desk, buried under a sheaf of paper or accidentally thrown out. In electronic form, this is no longer an issue. It can be shared amongst any number of employees, placed in a central or shared directory on your network, and accessed at any time. (Of course, if you want it to remain confidential then there are ways of going about this too.)

Document management is therefore a vital strand of lifting the performance of any business. Continuing with paper documents is simply inefficient and, sometimes, risky. Too much can be left to chance, paperwork gets lost or damaged, and handling times are unnecessarily long. Document processing – and especially invoice processing – allows you to expedite certain procedures, spending your time and money on what really matters.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Accounts payable audit systems can protect from fraudulence and error

Is your organisation paying more than it needs to? Look to world-class accounts payable audit software to detect unnecessary duplicate payments, as well as invoicing errors, compliance issues and supplier fraud. Recovery audit software can be used to help your Accounts Payable team in their efforts to control and improve processes.  Using this software takes away the need to employ costly Recovery Auditors to identify and recover duplicate payments. Instead, by empowering your own Accounts Payable teams with the right tools, costly auditor fees are cut and internal processes are improved.

There is a significant risk that medium and large organisations pay their supplier invoices twice. Duplicate payments are one of various overpayment errors that go undetected in the accounts payable process, and usually the most pricey. The total amount overpaid, one way or another, can run into many thousands of pounds or more for small or medium-sized businesses.

If you are uncertain whether this is an issue for your organisation, recovery audit software providers can usually provide proof with an AP health check that is often offered for free to qualifying organisations. This check consists of a partial analysis over several days to demonstrate any errors, compliance issues or supplier fraud within your system. This evidence then forms the basis for a sound business case.  The benefits of using this software are chiefly cutting unnecessary costs – which is no small benefit. It is important to act quickly as the opportunity of recovering extra payments drops each month. This is because every month some of your suppliers go out of business, merge or get bought. Old invoices cost more to recover, so cost increases with each month, too, and so it makes sense to secure a health-check as soon as you can in order to act on any inconsistencies.

The software is easy to use, and requires no special training. In fact, free online training is often offered by the provider. Tailored specifically to your business’s needs, fraud and risk are reduced and profitability increased. When put into place before a payment run, the software prevents unnecessary payments and therefore avoids the high expense of recovering money externally or internally.

For effective prevention and protection from fraudulence and error, improvement of your cost efficiencies and current AP systems, recovery audit software provides the answer. accounts payable audit programmes can process all past payment data for duplicate payments, helps you comply with internal and external guidelines, and protects valuable working capital – all at a low cost of ownership.

Please visit http://www.fiscaltechnologies.com/ for further information about this topic.

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Document management for smoother tracking and storage

document management is a vital part of any company’s operations, and simultaneously reduces costs and optimises working capital. Solutions to document processing can be frustrating when the provider turns out to be unreliable, or have hidden costs. With a capable provider however, routine and necessary procedures such as invoice processing are improved.

The way to think of the situation is not as a problem to be overcome, but as capital waiting to be utilised. These assets can be gathered via the available technologies into substantial tangible and intangible benefits.

Tangible benefits of document management are many, and include the reduction of space used for paper storage, saving you commercial property costs. Integrating documentation into management systems does away with the need to store large amounts of paper documentation on site, allowing it to be stored if necessary in less expensive locations – and protects data from on-paper vulnerability to theft, fire, flood and vandalism. DMS archiving also shields important paper documents from continual and damaging handling.
What is more, as well as ensuring higher security, these systems make data retrieval more flexible and intuitive, and save time as accessing data does not even mean leaving one’s desk. Multiple indexing can be performed simultaneously, search functions are rapid and can deploy a full text search, unlike paper or microfilm. Lost files are a thing of the past, as all documents are centrally stored.

As far as regulations and requirements are concerned, DMS security and control authenticates the validity of stored files and reduces the risk of withdrawn licenses and even legal action, by demonstrating regulatory compliance. Thanks to the central control of invoice processing, DMS also greatly improves cash flow.  Less tangible benefits include improved day-to-day operations internally, increasing the amount of information accessible to staff. This also has a positive effect on customer service, allowing accurate, quick and professional response. The ability to distribute information electronically saves time and fine-tunes audience targeting, lending a competitive advantage to your organisation over others not using DMS. For those that are, it removes a competitive disadvantage.

Finally, document management opens up the pool of information which would otherwise be locked in individual’s head or separate email exchanges – or at best, ‘round robin’ emails. Once this information undergoes document processing and is made shareable and accessible, its value increases and so does your employees’ ability to solve questions and tasks. Using invoice processing keeps all your financial transactions scheduled and trackable – all in all, the simplest and smartest business solution.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Video conferencing calls that encourage collaboration

It is very common in the working world these days to communicate with colleagues and business partners via email. Electronic correspondence has the benefit of being quick, cheap and environmentally friendly; huge amounts of paper previously wasted on administration have been drastically cut in the technological age. Email is also quite obviously advantageous to businesses with overseas clients; the ability to keep in touch with people regardless of the physical distance between them is something we now just take for granted. However, email is now being superseded by more specialist technologies that not only facilitate all of the above but also restore the human aspect of digitized encounters. video conferencing, telepresence video conferencing and audio visual conferencing are three variants of such advanced inventions.

Leading companies are already investing in audiovisual communications developments because it makes their practice more competitive and sends out a signal that they value design and performance in the products they choose to use. In fact, there are few signals that could give a stronger impression of a business with its finger on the pulse than telepresence video conferencing. Above and beyond the way in which email allows for two or more people to feel closer to one another, telepresence creates a life-like sense of being in the same room as the person you are conversing with. This is because it uses life-size images of individuals that can move in real time as projections. Does this sound like something from a science fiction film? That’s because it gives us a glimpse of the future where it can be safely predicted that telepresence will catch on.

Telepresence, as we have mentioned, is just one exciting new product though. Also hot on the audiovisual telecommunications market is video conferencing that can reduce company costs by up to 60% and audio visual conferencing products that work much like Skype or a web cam and traditional telephone to help workers broadcast messages to large audiences without having to be in the same geographical location. These audio visually-assisted meetings have the added bonus of being easy to reschedule – now that we have flexi-time working hours it makes sense to embrace flexible meetings.

Please visit http://www.edgevision.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Bacs software prioritises confidentiality

It doesn’t matter what kind or what size of business you are in, it goes without saying that it has in common with all businesses the need to make and receive payments. Indeed, the very definition of the word business implies the practice of acquiring or selling goods or services. The most commercially successful businesses tend to be those that make highest number of exchanges; for those with their sights set on topping the market, buying and selling the right commodities at the right price becomes an art to be repeated as frequently as possible. With an increased number of exchanges comes an increased level of responsibility, however, clients will expect to pay for and receive their goods quickly and without encountering mistakes or delays. bacs software can help meet these clients’ demands by minimizing errors and time lapses because, quite simply, BACS payments are both efficient and almost infallible. There was once a time when BACS were synonymous with slowness – sometimes taking over three days to clear. Now it is a different story; these automated payments represent one of the fastest and most secure methods of exchanging money.

The improved service provided by BACS means that increasing numbers of businesses are using this payment method to conduct the transactions they are involved in. The fact that one improvement has been in security has been a key factor in this increase: optimum levels of security really are paramount in business because not only do they keep businesses’ secrets confidential and their revenue protected against fraud, they also safeguard the banking and personal details of clients.

Customers who feel appreciated by the businesses they deal with are much more likely to use a company’s services or invest in their goods again. Indeed, in the opposite situation clients who feel badly treated are likely to complain and blight the reputation of a business. Altogether, businesses and their clients are advised to use BACS software to make and receive their BACS payments. Anything other than bacs has simply not stood the test of time and proved itself to be efficient.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Next Generation Access Promises Change

Things are looking up for rural web users as community broadband steps up to the plate with the launch of next generation access to online services. The UK’s ICT infrastructure is developing at a fast pace, and will soon allow web users to access their favourite sites far quicker than ever before.

For a long time, internet users in rural areas have been severely disadvantaged, in comparison with users from urban areas. While traditional ‘dial-up’ internet still works as well as ever in the countryside, the increased speed of broadband services – not to mention the uncluttered phone line which broadband frees up – mean that the vast majority of users are always looking to improve their internet access with broadband services. However, the extremely different services experienced by inhabitants living in broadband ‘hot spots’ and those living in broadband ‘not spots’ are so far apart that the variation has been termed a ‘digital divide.’ Shockingly, those with connections in the ‘not spots’ pay exactly the same price for their internet connections as those in ‘hot spots,’ despite the inferior service that they receive.

The average speed of internet access, considered acceptable for everyday use at home, is 8 to 10 megabytes per second – but this figure is far from being universal. At the moment, around 4,000 households in the UK have no broadband access at all, as a result of their rural location. And there are another 2.5 million houses which only receive web access at a speed of 2.5 megabytes per second. This speed of access means that streaming videos – for instance on YouTube or on TV networks’ ‘catch up’ services – is just impossible for many country dwellers.

Luckily, more and more people in these rural households are finding solutions to this inequality. Many rural communities are forming co-operative ways of achieving faster broadband; for instance, creating their own ISPs (internet service providers) by buying their own cable connections. These are pricey, but the collaboration of local businesses or well-off residents also wins them a stake in an enterprise which may well provide returns on their investments.

This type of collaboration is known as a community broadband project, in which inhabitants of a certain region join up to find internet solutions through the power of numbers. And the prospect of next generation access, in which fibre optics will replace some of the slower copper cable through which broadband currently runs, may well change the UK’s ICT infrastructure for good.

Please visit http://www.broadbandvantage.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Shop for sale in London – check with your local estate agency

London is the place where business will never slow down; the financial, political and cultural hub of the UK. There’s always a room to rent or a shop for sale in london – and from office space in the City to shops to let in North London, established brand Claridges has it all. Whether you’re looking for retail or commercial property London can’t fail to satisfy.

Shops in particular are changing hands every day in this buzzing metropolis, and it can be hard for a budding business entrepreneur to work out just where to move to. Many people choose to set up small businesses, or to let commercial property, near to their homes for the advantages of doing business in an area they’re familiar with. However, this plan can let you down badly. A little more dedicated research can reveal what the real priorities in making the decision should be – which is why most new business owners either cover research themselves, or seek the advice of a professional, before deciding to purchase or rent new premises.

London is a very diverse city, and its cultures can change from area to area. Only first-hand knowledge of the city will enable business people to know, for instance, that a kosher butcher’s shop stands a better chance in Brent Cross than in Brixton; or that luxury goods are better placed in Hampstead than in nearby Tottenham. The many districts of London constantly diversify; King’s Cross was a low-priced address not so long ago, but now the Eurostar at St Pancras, along with other trends, has made it a hub for tourist shopping and good restaurants.

And people don’t only buy or go for shops to rent in north London in order to develop businesses; property space can also be bought as an investment. The speedy gentrification of certain areas means that large returns can be achieved when the right investments are made. Real estate in London is some of the most expensive in the world, and with more and more people wanting to live and work in the UK capital, this is the one area of investment in which entrepreneurs can feel really secure.

So for those clients looking for shops to let in North London or Canary Wharf’s best commercial property London has a lot to offer. Anyone aiming to find a warehouse to rent or a shop for sale in london will have a great chance of getting what they’re looking for in this ever-changing city and its diverse districts.

Please visit http://www.claridges-commercial.co.uk for further information about this topic.

http://www.claridges-commercial.co.uk

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